Suffer the Wound of Love

Posted on May 27, 2010 by Josh

When I was younger, I always associated “love” with the feeling of sexual passion – the intense desire, the suffering in that desire, the longing…and the consummation of that longing and desire.

For a while, “love” was just my addiction to the chemical “squirt” in my body that I felt in moments of passion.

Now, love means much more to me. It isn’t an instantaneous thing, but a process. Love is still passion, still that desire/fire, but it is also the process of suffering the wound of separation…remaining within yourself, appreciating the other person’s path as their own, and not interfering…loving them from “so close, yet so far away.”

Or, updated a bit…

This recent article in Parade – A Connecting Flight – sums up part of this so well, I had to post it. Please read it, I think it’s worthwhile.

We often forget, in moments or relationships, in that wonderful gush of chemicals flooding our body, that there is another person, another individual, there with us. Or that we are an individual person, with our own history, issues, joys, and desires – that all are only, ultimately, experienced by us alone.

And what happens when that high wears off? When we become used to the presence of that cocktail in our system?

No one else feels what you feel. We agree on meanings of words, and approximate agreement on what we’re feeling inside by using those words…but it’s only ever an approximation.

No one ever feels what you feel. And you never feel what someone else feels.

To try to even get close requires so much space, so much observation, so much silence, and listening, that most of us never get there. But that’s what love really is…the attempt to get there. The attempt to give that much space, observation, silence, listening, care, facilitation, whatever you want to call it…

We’re so busy with our lives, with our own feelings, and our ideas of what the other person may be living or feeling, that we rarely clear space to see if we can really experience that connection.

In the article above, it often only hits us, as with so many things in life, too late. Or, if we’re lucky, when we meet someone who can wake us up to that.

Part of the goal of “physiology tracking” is knowing your own physiological responses to things, so you can see those in others. So you don’t have to rely on words – which are never good enough.

But to track, you have to be silent. You have to be careful. You have to clear your mind of opinions, and let the signs guide you.

Another goal of physiology tracking is to stay true to yourself. Only if you know yourself, your physiology, can you be aware enough to keep it in check when it threatens to overrun you, or allow it to overrun you when you most need or want it to.

Learn to be a tracker.

Desire, as my Sensei, Mick Dodge says, is Fire – it is an ember within you, and you have to carry and protect it, to tend to it, like a fire bundle, and to stoke it into life.

The rhythmic process of the rise and fall of desire/fire can be encouraged. And then it becomes a relationship with yourself, a new lens through which to see things, a new way to experience different dimensions of “reality.”

Part of love is respecting the other person’s path, their full path – the place where their desire ebbs and flows – as the thing that you loved, inseparable from the rest, and the thing that you love now.

Even if it’s the pair of slippers you trip over every day.

But to feel this, you have to agree to suffer the wound of love, the suffering (which is what “passion” really means, by the way) of the whole person of the other, of the realization that the other is complete, and you are too, and you embrace it all.

The Loss of Intelligence

Posted on February 16, 2010 by Josh

My friend JR Atwood posted a great TED talk by Liz Coleman, regarding the nature of education in our day and age.

I’m more concerned with something more foundational – the use of common sense.

My father is in the hospital. He’s been in before – most seriously, when he underwent emergency surgery to replace his aorta with a gortex tube, four years ago.

He’s been having some issues, and went back in recently. The doctors have him on so many medications, it’s hard to tell what’s causing what.

And that’s my problem.

The doctors have no faith in the human body to heal itself.

In days of old, before “internal medicine” (which is anything but “internal” – consisting as it does, mostly of “external” items leveraged against the internal state), the body was regarded as a delicate and powerful system. To attain health, one usually only needed to do things (or do fewer things) to return that system to balance…

Called “homeostasis” – the balance of activity within the body.

What’s Up, Doc?

Where did the faith go? Where is the faith in the human body to heal itself? Only in “alternative” medicines? Even there, many alternative practitioners have taken on the cultural values of US culture, and peddle pills and external “cures.”

Doctoring the Evidence

Another faith disappeared around the same time as the faith in the human body – faith in the healing power of the Earth. I don’t want to get too crazy with this (you’ll be calling me a “hippie” in a minute if I’m not careful, boxing me in), but the point is salient.

As the values of “science” (the “expertism” that Liz Coleman mentions in her talk) overtook common sense, it killed any other thought process or options.

When society realized that this expertise-value could be used to sell more products, it took the reins. As people have become more and more inculcated in the idea of “the expert,” other options disappear.

And so does common sense.

Doctor My Doctor

Now we’ve reached a point where it has become commonsense to refer to “experts” for our opinions – for our common sense.

My father lies in a hospital bed tonight. The doctors have not healed him at all. They can’t figure out what’s wrong. Because they’re incapable of asking questions.

The foundational of all common sense is found in a single question:

Why?

Strength = Longevity

Posted on December 30, 2009 by Josh

A relatively recent research study reveals a connection (of some sort) between muscular strength and longevity.

The article, “Association between muscular strength and mortality in men: prospective cohort study,” says that “Muscular strength is inversely and independently associated with death from all causes in men, even after adjusting for cardiorespiratory fitness and other potential confounders.”

This is not an insignificant study. The researchers used data from the Cooper Institute in Texas, and included 8762 men aged 20-80 in the study.

Why might muscular strength be correlated with longevity? Well, there are a few reasons I can think of off the top of my head. Here’s one:

For one, balance is highly correlated with muscular strength. While the “scientists” among us will argue about “tonic” (the so-called “anti-gravity” muscles), and “phasic” (the “mover” muscles) muscles, I can tell you from personal experience that, when someone isn’t very strong, they aren’t very stable – and that “working on stability” (as much “functional training” does nowadays) by balancing on one leg on a Bosu ball, is the long, slow, hard road to stability…working on “gross strength” has much faster and better results.

Anyway, as we get older, we tend to lose muscle mass, strength, and with it, balance and proprioception (spatial awareness). A lot of this has to do with lack of use in old age. Some of it is “programmed.” That being said, falls and related fractures, etc., can lead to death, or can lead to further lack of movement, which becomes more and more fatal the older we get.

The bottom line – get stronger. My next post will be about this…

Your External Organ

Posted on November 17, 2009 by Josh

Ok dirty birds, before you get any ideas, let me tell you what “external organ” I’m talking about:

The environment.

Yes, I said it! But I don’t mean “the environment,” as in what you try to save by driving a Prius, or by recycling. Well, I sort of do, but I think the word has been cheapened by those things a bit.

The environment is everything external to you. Yes, it is the “natural” world – trees, earth, dirt, grass, birds, animals, etc. It is also your house, the street you live on, your friends neighbors and enemies, your children, your parents, the airplane flying over your house.

Again, “the environment” is everything external to your body.

The “internal organs” of your body are these:

Adrenals — Appendix — Bladder — Brain — Eyes — Gall bladder — Heart — Intestines — Kidney — Liver — Lungs — Esophagus — Ovaries — Pancreas — Parathyroids — Pituitary — Prostate — Spleen — Stomach — Testicles — Thymus — Thyroid — Uterus — Veins

The internal organs of the body are “collection of tissues joined in structural unit to serve a common function.” More importantly, they are the functional units of your body. They work in harmony to allow you to live. Without any one of them, you die.

Your “external organ” is the collective “thing” outside of you, that similarly supports your life. Without any part of your external organ – without plants and animals for food, or plants and sunlight and water for air, or dirt, or the people around you, or the birds, or anything else – you die.

The "Carbon Cycle" - Your External Organ Breathes

Now consider your actions in relation to this external organ of your body. For the people who are so detached from their own body that they cannot feel it or relate to it, this won’t mean much – but it might be a path back to the body. It might be easier for them to first understand their relationship to their external organ.

Another Cycle of Your External Organ

Happiness, and Grandma

Posted on July 25, 2009 by Josh

I had a wonderful dinner at a barbeque at Jen Fuller’s tonight, who is a most gracious host – lots of good food, drink, and conversation.

Of course, health was discussed at a certain point. And everyone agreed that one ingredient is more critical to health and longevity than any other – happiness.

My grandmother, for me, is a case in point.

She lived to be 89 years old. She died last Friday, a week ago, succumbing to cancer after a fight of 7 months.

For my grandmother, happiness was the secret to life, and life was the secret to happiness.

Every day, she once told me, she would wake up and say “Happy day, happy day! Thank you Lord for another day on this earth!”

That was her attitude toward life. She loved it, she loved the fact that she was alive, just because she was alive.

She grew up in the hills of Ashville, NC. She was a hillbilly. She grew up on a farm, and became a nurse as a young lady. She was married before she got much nursing practice, though, and soon had two boys to care for (my father and his brother – my uncle).

She was a young lady in the 40′s and 50′s, when it was common to smoke and drink at any time, and for any occasion. She carried her farm diet with her her entire life – bacon, eggs…fatty foods were common…so were pies, roasts, and the like. Not “the image of health.”

In fact, one of the funnier more recent stories is from grandma’s visit to the hospital, just last year, for her regular check up. She was the picture of health. The nurse asked her, “Mrs. Leeger, do you drink?”

“Yes,” my grandmother said, matter of factly.

“How much do you drink, ma’am?” the nurse asked.

“As much as I want to,” my grandmother replied.

That got the nurse good! She laughed, and asked my grandmother what, exactly, that meant.

“Well, it depends,” my grandmother said. “If I’m at a party, and everyone is drinking, well I have a drink every time they do. If I’m at home, I may just have one or two drinks on my own, or none at all.”

My grandma lived life the way I’d hope to. She was happy all the time – whether times were good or not. She trusted that her current situation was all that it could be. And being all that it could be, it was as good as it could get.

As good as it could get, how could you be sad? Unless you were just maudlin by nature.

She lived to be 89, without advanced exercise prescriptions, without sets and reps, without a boot camp, without Pilates, or Crossfit, or Powerlifting, or anything else.

She lived to be 89 by being happy – certainly, she had exuberance!

She lived to be 89 by living according to what she knew in her heart was right.

I miss her.

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You are going to die

Posted on June 24, 2009 by Josh

This isn’t a joke! You are going to die…someday.

I hope that it isn’t soon, and that it isn’t painful. But nevertheless, it will happen someday. That’s how life works.

What strikes me as strange is the obsessiveness with which we often approach our prejudices toward certain things. Specifically, for this blog, I’ll discuss this with relation to fitness – but it’s true of anything.

People in the fitness world have all sorts of “rules” that you’re supposed to follow. Eat this, don’t eat that. Exercise this much, but no more, and no less. Do this ten times a day. Do that once a month. Eat these pills once after every other meal on Wednesdays.

You’re supposed to “activate your core” and build [insert bodypart here] “of steel.” You should only drink non-flouridated water from a holy stream that trickles from the top of Everest for one month every Spring.

You need to “challenge your proprioception and balance.” You need to do “multiplanar exercise” and get into your “heart rate zone.”

And you do! You race around, doing all this stuff. You eat organic, you drink the Yogic water, you practice your Asana’s, you give your Pilates instructor a cash gift every Christmas.

Then you die.

And not only do you die, but you probably die roughly around the same age as everyone else in your generation. Maybe you live ten year longer than your fast-food-abusing classmates. And maybe not.

Maybe you live a couple of years less than the person who ate moderately well, and exercised moderately, all those years. And maybe not.

My point is this – there’s little credence to most of the bullshit we try to sell ourselves and each other every day.

Will fast food kill you? Yes, in excess. In excess anything will kill you. Unhappiness is a killer if sustained for too long. Too much sunlight (plus other environmental stressors…like sunscreen) will give you cancer. Too little, also, can kill you.

You are going to die. The most important thing is that, while you’re alive, you get the most out of it, and help others to do the same (so that they, in turn, will help you, etc.). Do things you love to do. Do things that make you really effing happy. I mean – EXUBERANT. DO THEM NOW! And help others to do the same.

And forget about all those bullshit “rules.” You know what’s good for you. Do it.